Connecting HipChat and Telegram

HipChat, the team collaboration platform from Atlassian, is one of the most popular workspace collaboration services out there. It works very well for internal communication, but when transacting with consultants, contractors, or customers, there are a few complications.

First, the guest access feature is fairly limited. It's not very secure, history is not preserved from the perspective of the guest, and there's not much a guest can do to use it while on-the-go.

Second, if a consultant, customer, or contractor happens to be based out of a location with poor connectivity, the broadband-hungry HipChat may have a hard time staying connected.

The combination of HipChat and Telegram—coupled through Sameroom—could be the perfect duet for these situations. Telegram works well in low-bandwidth, high-latency environments, making smooth, real-time communication a reality for folks stationed in remote, poorly-connected outposts, such as San Francisco.

To give this a shot, create a room (open or private) in HipChat for communication with your outsider. Invite everyone from your team who is involved on the project. Then, create a new group in Telegram and invite the outsider (or outsiders!). Then, follow these steps:

Follow the Open a Tube menu option to Choose your HipChat room for side A and Telegram group for side B.

That should do it. You can customize the way your messages appear in Telegram—take a look at this post to learn more. You can also keep certain messages local to the HipChat side only, with the hush command. The hush command is very handy if you need to mention someone on your team, ask a question, or add a comment without broadcasting this fact across to the Telegram side.